Colluding with carceral white women
What about crime and punishment? What do we do? What about Restorative Justice? Julie Bindel looks at the details:
Restorative justice (RJ) is described as an alternative to prison; it is a non-punitive response to criminal behaviour. The idea is to bring together the person who inflicted the harm (the “responsible person”, in RJ terminology) and the victim, often in the presence of community representatives. The perpetrator is supposed to accept responsibility for the harm inflicted and reach an agreement with the victim about how to make amends.
I think one problem leaps off the page at this juncture: what if the victim doesn’t want to be brought together with the responsible person? Like, suppose the crime was violent and traumatic, and the victim never wants to lay eyes on the perp ever again? This is one reason rape is hard to prosecute, I think: prosecution generally requires laying eyes on the perp again.
De Blasio’s reforms were welcomed by prison reform campaigners, as well as pretty much every liberal in the State. Alissa Ackerman, a sex crimes policy researcher at California State University and one of the few facilitators of restorative justice sessions for rape victims, has said that RJ, “allows survivors to have their pain heard and stories acknowledged, and is an opportunity for the person who caused the harm to be accountable for their actions”.
There’s that word again – “stories.” It’s not a story; it’s not a narrative. It’s not a talk thing. Rape is the opposite of a story.
I spoke to one proponent of RJ, who asked not to be named “in case I am seen as colluding with carceral white women”.
You know, those bitches who have the bad taste to get raped by non-white men.
It’s an issue. It’s always been an issue. It was an issue during slavery and by god it was a massive issue once Reconstruction was killed. Gone With the Wind contains one of those racist post-Reconstruction rape—>KKK stories, which poisoned the minds of generations. Think the Scottsboro Boys, think Emmett Till. But. It doesn’t follow that rape victims, even white ones, are obliged to meet with their rapists for a chat and then let it go.
I spoke to one proponent of RJ, who asked not to be named “in case I am seen as colluding with carceral white women”. White himself, he is a newly trained lawyer in Washington DC, specialising in “replacing the racist system with a true healing process for both parties”. “Anti-rape feminists are probably responsible for more black men being incarcerated than anyone else in modern-day America”, he says. “Locking up African Americans is a product of slavery.” Ben went on to suggest “community resolution” and “non-violent strategies” to address sexual assault.
Pesky anti-rape feminists – why can’t they be like those cool pro-rape feminists? Easy for Ben to suggest “community resolution” when he’s highly unlikely to be a rape victim.
Sarah, whose name I’ve changed, runs a support service for victims of male violence in NYC and is “appalled” that RJ is becoming a substitute for criminal justice sanctions. “What we are seeing is what we have seen forever”, she tells me, “which is the under-policing and under-protection for women, including women of colour. But some BLM activists are claiming that feminists calling for CJS sanctions for rape and domestic abuse is flat-out racist, because black men are overrepresented in the prison population.” As a result, she told me that “black and brown women, indigenous women … are the ones who are bearing the consequences of us not holding men accountable for their violence. They are the ones who are being murdered and raped and their abusers are walking free.”
The problem is that punishment isn’t really a productive or satisfactory response. It’s basically vengeance, which is an obvious dead end. But doing nothing (and just having a chat is doing nothing) is even worse than non-productive. I don’t know of any solution to this stalemate, but I sure as hell think telling women to just move on is not it.
According to the ideals of RJ, after a crime is committed the offender and the victim should meet face-to-face. The victim is not to blame or judge the perpetrator, but rather describe the impact of the offence, in order to “heal” and become “empowered”. RJ sees victim and perpetrator as equal, both in need of support and understanding.
If they were equal he wouldn’t have been able to rape her.
RJ is considered a suitable remedy for domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse and sex trafficking, among other violent crimes predominantly committed by men. Most of these crimes are committed against women by men known to them: male family members, partners and colleagues. “The perpetrators have worked very hard, often for years, to condition the person they are abusing to not disclose, to minimise, to protect his emotions: to protect his character publicly”, says Sarah. “They’ve been using manipulative tactics to inspire self-doubt, blame and fear, in the person they are abusing.”
And victims of this kind of abuse may feel coerced by RJ practices, which are conducted, as Sarah said, “without any understanding of the dynamics of power and control, the impact of a trauma-coerced bond, and also the amount of time and commitment that it actually takes to elicit genuine behaviour change in abusers”.
It doesn’t sound at all restorative, does it.
Restorative justice has always seemed rather “let’s hold hands and sing kumbaya” to me, as though its advocates have as much understanding of human nature as Pollyanna.
Vengeance is an obvious dead end? I think vengeance is eminently satisfying. I just wish I could have some vengeance for things done to me. How do most people feel? I see vengeance as the ultimate healing and empowerment. Much more so than a meeting where you are not allowed to ‘blame or judge’ the person who injured you. Describing ‘the impact of the offence’ may give the perpetrator just what he wants. I can imagine many perpetrators enjoying that enormously.
Yeah, as much as I would like us to rethink our criminal justice system, I’m pretty skeptical of restorative justice. If a particular victim is up for it, then fine I guess (although I still think society has an interest in taking action), but I’m concerned that there’s a lot of pressure on victims to participate.
It’s my understanding that marital counseling is not recommended where one of the participants is a narcissist or sociopath, because they know how to “win” therapy and use it against their partner. This strikes me as a similar problem.
Sounds like Alison Phipps.
It’s foundational to Restorative Justice that nobody is required to participate. However it has been shown to help both the victims and the perpetrators of crime. Not every time, obviously. But it’s a tool in the tool box.
I hadn’t known that restorative justice applied to violent crimes, and especially not rape, domestic abuse or any other sexual crime. I had understood it to be a solution to property crimes. This is an eye-opener.
Peter N – But even if nobody is required to participate, there may be all kinds of pressure to do so, don’t you think? Psychological, political, justicey, all that? Which is all the more difficult to resist because it’s true that the US does far too much punishing versus far too little rehabilitating, mending, restoring.
I might as well note that restorative justice is not the only alternative to retributive justice, philosophically speaking. That is, those aren’t the only possible or even significant theories of justice on offer.
Ophelia at #7 — I don’t doubt that that could happen, but that would be doing it wrong.
Well that’s not much comfort is it. Ok maybe there’s a Platonic Right Way to do it, but if it lends itself to doing it wrong by coercing victims, which Julie’s article discusses, then who cares that there’s a Right Way?
Nullius – hum a few more bars if you feel like it. I’ve read a little about theories of justice but only a little.
Count me a little skeptical even in the case of nonviolence. Many of the organized smash and grab robberies this past year are by large organized gangs. I see little value in a heartfelt conversation between a gang leader and some department store loss manager. Lock ‘‘em up.
Ohtobide #2
I think that the whole issue needs to be reframed — locking people up and calling it punishment or vengeance or rehabilitation needs to be dumped. The focus on the criminals is the problem.
We need to lock up criminals in order to give the rest of society a break from the criminal’s behavior. The idea that needs to get through is that this person who chooses to harm others is being given a long time-out so that other people get a break from being harmed by the choices the criminal makes. Even “non-violent” crimes can harm others in many ways.
The whole restorative justice thing is a dream come true for rapists and pedophiles. They get to sit and watch their victims be traumatized again while the maybe-well-meaning fools who push rj sit around and pressure the victim to forgive just because the rapist or pedophile said “Oh, yeah, I am SO sorry” and managed to keep his smirking to a minimum.
Ohtobide @#2:
Most human societies, like most animal ones, are dominance hierarchies. eg the ‘pecking orders’ among the chickens in a chicken yard, and top-dog/ underdog amongst dogs and their wolf ancestors. Thus also military ranks; no army I have any knowledge about is a democracy, no matter what it purports to fight for.
Rape can be about spreading one’s genes as far and as wide as possible (a bloke by the name of Genghis Khan having been on of the outstanding success stories there, I believe) but it is also about power. Thus, it may help to turn the perp-victim relationship around.
My solution: bring back the lash. Flog the rapist until his victim calls the process to a halt. Could do wonders for improvment of the perp’s future behaviour, likewise for the victim’s self-esteem. Worth a try, surely.
This one line spun my head. Sex crime convictions are only the third-highest cause of incarceration. They’re about half that of weapons/explosives charges,and a quarter of–no surprise to anyone who hasn’t had their head up their ass for the last 45 years–drug charges. And if we’re lumping in all sexual offenses together, we should probably also lump together all the various categories of greed-motivated crimes (including Robbery and Extortion/Fraud, as well as baseline “Property Crimes”), which makes sex crimes a narrow fourth-place runner.
Source: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp
Now, there WAS a strong narrative of drug-crazed black men assaulting white women used to sell the War on Drugs; but it wasn’t so much feminists that were the targets of that campaign, as it was white, patriarchal males, who are prone to the fantasy that it’s our job to protect the weak, helpless womens (so that we can keep them pure for ourselves).
Most of the really damning cases of “white woman falsely accuses black man of rape” occurred when the woman in question was in danger of (severe, and potentially even fatal) punishment herself, if she had admitted to consensual sex with a black man. There are exceptions, of course–the Central Park Dog-Walker, for instance, who tried to weaponize the cop’s racism during a petty argument with a genuinely innocent black man–but those are rare in comparison with the reality.
While I can see RJ-style approaches working to the victim’s benefit in SOME cases, I just can’t buy it as a general rule. It should be an option made available to the victim on top of the actual criminal justice system, not instead of it.
New Zealand has a long established process of RJ. It doesn’t apply in cases of manslaughter, murder, rape, or extreme violence.
The process is voluntary, and either party may withdraw at any time.
The aim of RJ is to centre the offender and victim and give the victim a better sense of being heard than in an adversarial court process where there is every chance the perpetrator may walk. However, RJ does not replace the court system. The case will proceed to Court, the twin outcomes being a more humane treatment of the victim and potentially reduced sentence and better rehabilitation for the offender.
https://www.justice.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Publications/Restorative-Justice-Practice-Framework-August-2019.pdf
That sounds like a much better system.
Of course, one problem with the prison system is that it is so inhumane. Having a decent place to house prisoners, decent food, activities that allow them to entertain/educate/recreate themselves, not shoving people into barren rooms with bunks and a toilet.
I think some people absolutely need a “time out” as someone above said. But the nature of the prison system needs to be reconsidered. I’m not suggesting making it a posh hotel or a vacation resort, but maybe a one person cell with comfortable bed, bathroom not in the same room, decent furnishings, and the right to decorate? We might have better luck with rehabilitation if we didn’t put them in cages that are worse than zoo animals get.
Nullius @ #8 – But finding out what’s causing the problem and doing the exact opposite has always worked so well!
“Anti-rape feminists are probably responsible for more black men being incarcerated than anyone else in modern-day America”, he says. “Locking up African Americans is a product of slavery.”
Black men or any other men who rape are responsible for being incarcerated. Locking up rapists is a consequence of their violent crime.
” The victim is not to blame or judge the perpetrator…RJ sees victim and perpetrator as equal”
The age-old answer to rape: Get over it, boys will be boys. The most regressive attitude imaginable toward rape, disguised as a decent response. The sort of people who advocate this kind of thinking are as sick as Q-Anon followers that insist that Hillary eats babies.